2.4 Torah

The Jews call it Torah. Christians call it the Pentateuch. It consists of the first 5 books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and is known colloquial as 'The Law'. 'The Law' is shorthand for 'the law of Moses', it was afterall Moses who is recorded as receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. There is a tradition that it was Moses who wrote these first books of our Bible, but is that tradition true?

The prevailing theory of how these first books of the Bible came into being is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. This theory breaks these books down into four individually identifiable authors that were then written together into a single record by a redactor, known as R. The four sources are called the Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomist (D) and Priestly (P). Each author lived in a different place and time and this is identifiable through the text that they have handed down to us. For example the Priestly writer is very concerned with formality and ritual. The Jahwist source talks about God like a person and uses the divine name YHWH.

Splitting the record into these components scholars are able to identify certain peculiarities with the text such as why Abraham tries to pass his wife off as his sister twice, once in Genesis 12:11-13 (identified as a J source) and once in Genesis 20:2 (identified as an E source). Both stemming from a common original, but through two different branches of oral tradition. Another example is why Joseph is variously sold to Midianites (E) and Ishmaelites (J).

Perhaps the best example of this is Noah's Ark where the two sources can be split apart verse by verse and sentence by sentence into two coherent stories (follow link to individual accounts: Jahwist and Priestly). These stories work on their own without the other and when put together the differences between them become highlighted in a way I'd never seen before.

The final part of the puzzle is when this was written. Due to anachronisms in the text such as out of place domestication of animals, use of tools and names of cities the consensus date for the writing and completion of this work is from 950 BC to 450 BC, well after Moses and even after the united monarchy in the time of King David around 1000 BC.

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